Hurry Up and Slow Down

That is meant to be read as one sentence, up there, not two separate ideas. 🙂 Today’s post is a bit of a ramble, I’m afraid… which is very indicative of my jumbled, hurried brain.

I ground coffee this morning. Brought the coffee grinder in from outside, wiped all the dust off, poured the beans in… the act itself is not so amazing but that I took the time to do it is. I’ve been out of coffee for four days. For an overtired Mama it’s pure torture and yet… why did it take me so long?

In the aftermath of the garage sale I struggled to rein in the chaos around the house… things are finally (mostly) clean again. The floor needs vacuuming again, but then, I have a baby who is learning to eat so it always needs vacuuming. (I wish I had a magical dog who would come and do my bidding and disappear again when I snap my fingers.) There are things that need picked up, as usual. Nothing has really changed, other than I shifted to overdrive mode prior to that garage sale weekend and I’m still hopping from one task to the next…

Hurry up and make a blog post so that I can hurry up and feed the baby so I can hurry up and get Munchkin from preschool so I can hurry up and come home and put the baby down to hurry up and maybe draw for a few minutes so I can hurry up and make dinner… it goes on, but I’m sure you get the gist. I’m not slowing down to enjoy anything. And I’m starting to pay for it.

I’m pretty sure I’m using sugar as a self-regulating mechanism for my bipolar/depression tendencies. Every time I start spinning off – either up or down – I start craving something sweet to chew on. It doesn’t help for long, of course. And this is not sustainable. At least it’s not something worse like alcohol or something stronger, but I’d rather manage the problem instead of the symptom.

I’ve been working on getting Elf to sleep through the night… we’re on night three of sleeping from 11 p.m. to about 5 or 5:30 a.m. (yay!), which is good enough for me for now… except I keep waking up at 2 a.m. with the most horrifically vivid bad dreams. Apparently my body still needs some time to adjust.

And the final straw is the eating thing… I’ve been struggling to figure out why I am nauseated every time I eat or drink something. As you might guess, not eating much at all for a few days in a row doesn’t help the mind-jumbly, not seeing straight, feeling drained issues! I took the step of cutting dairy out almost entirely, and that has helped a little, although I’m also getting a little more sleep at night. That helps too. Believe it or not, I woke up “morning sick” every morning for years… high school through part of college and it wasn’t until I realized it was constant over-tiredness and stress (and birth control, in the later years) that I managed to control it. A funny fact… because I’d experienced that for so long, I didn’t realize I was pregnant with Munchkin for 10 weeks. I’d completely pooh-poohed the idea AND outright denied it to a couple people who suggested it… Ha.

Anyway, I hadn’t ground coffee because I didn’t think I had the time. And a couple of times, I legitimately didn’t. BUT it hit me that “not having the time” for four mornings in a row was a little ridiculous. And then I realized this…

One of my pet peeves on the road are those drivers who weave and pass you and speed ahead… only to jerk to a halt at the next stoplight. And then you cruise up (going the speed limit or a little below, I might add) and slow down a little… just in time for the light to change. You serenely drive on through… and what is that other driver thinking? Do they even notice that all their Hurry up and Get Somewhere isn’t going anywhere faster than the slower folks?

I say this to make a point, because I’m acting exactly like one of those drivers.

“Obstacles in the road aren’t there to trip you up, they’re there to make sure you slow down to enjoy the journey.” ~Me

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8 thoughts on “Hurry Up and Slow Down”

4 mornings? FOUR mornings?! How did you survive? Haha, just kidding, mostly. I seriously would turn into an official scary mommy if I didn’t have my morning coffee.
Good for you for even realizing that you need to slow down a bit. Even that realization can take some time to figure out. I hope getting more sleep helps your stomach issues. I know that sleep affects me a ridiculous amount, as do nerves and stress. My mom gets nausea for weeks sometimes when she has extra stress in her life… Maybe, as you indicate, with Munchkin starting preschool, the big garage sale, having a young baby…all of that can be extra stressful, right? At least, for me it has been. Much more than I thought it would be when I was naively pregnant with my first. Here’s to us both taking it slow!!

Wow, Dakota, just…wow. This was fabulous. And timely. And relatable. And necessary. And did I mention that it’s fabulous?

Seriously, I about spit out my seltzer when I read paragraph #4. This. Times a gazillion.

I second Joellen’s comment above in which she wishes she could bring you coffee. But, actually, I wish we lived close enough so that we could go and grab some together. Sans kids, of course, because we need a break. 😉

I’m beginning to think we need a blogger meet up and let me tell you, I never thought I’d say THAT in a million years. 🙂 Thank you so much for your compliments… you spoil me. 🙂 And I bet you’re all over paragraph No. 4… aren’t we all, as moms?!

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